


The Most Handsome Prince in the Entire World

by counterheist



Series: cubicle gods [4]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Bedtime Stories, Disgusting Married People, Domestic Fluff, Fanciful Descriptions of Depression - Freeform, Gen, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 10:56:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10897911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/counterheist/pseuds/counterheist
Summary: “Now which story would you like tonight?” he asks.“Papa!” she exclaims, as though he’s being particularly silly. He is, of course, because he’s been telling her the same story since she was born. Since before she was born, even, much to Mari’s heavily-pregnant amusement and Yuuri’s silent horror. “The story with the prince.Youknow.”An interlude in a story about cubicles, about how the people who work in them get their children ready for sleep.





	The Most Handsome Prince in the Entire World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NotTheTomato](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotTheTomato/gifts).



> thanks to mac for the read-through. thanks to cesare for the help on trying to get the original version of this back!

Chiho may look just like Yuuri, but when it is time for her to go to bed she is all Viktor. “Papa,” she will say, dragging the stuffed tiger her uncle gave her along the floor behind her as she walks into their bedroom, “Papa, story.” She means both of them, even though she knows she’ll only get one of them. She’s cheerfully optimistic like that, especially when it comes to her bedtime stories. She would move halfway around the world for them. Viktor’s daughter through and through.

Yuuri takes his turn at story night every now and then, but they both know her absolute favorite is one she can only get from Viktor. Yuuri doesn’t mind, exactly. He gives her a kiss on each cheek and tells her to sleep peacefully. He taps Viktor on the hip when they go their separate ways in the hallway, Chiho pulling Viktor off towards her bedroom, Yuuri walking with Makkachin on his heels down to the nursery to feed the baby. Viktor steals a quick kiss as he’s dragged away, which isn’t a terrible thing at all. Yuuri’s had worse things stolen from him.

“Story, story, story,” Chiho chants as she settles into her bed. His princess is a little spoiled, Viktor will admit, but it’s not in him to refuse her anything. Part of that may stem from his own lonely childhood, or from the fact that she looks like a small female version of his absolute favorite adult. Not his favorite person, because he doesn’t have just one anymore: he has three.

He sits down beside his daughter, careful not to disturb the order her stuffed animals are kept in. Her bear is no longer allowed to sit next to her owls because of something it said to them last Thursday in the park. Viktor isn’t as good at keeping up with these things as Yuuri is, but he respects her rules anyway. He picks up a lady walrus knight and holds it in his lap. “Now which story would you like tonight?” he asks.

“ _Papa_!” she exclaims, as though he’s being particularly silly. He is, of course, because he’s been telling her the same story since she was born. Since before she was born, even, much to Mari’s heavily-pregnant amusement and Yuuri’s silent horror. “The story with the prince. _You_ know.”

“Oh _that_ story,” he says, putting an arm around her shoulders to hold her close. “Well you should have said so sooner.” He clears his throat, as he always does, and waits for her to hold her tiger to her chest, as she always does. When she is ready he begins.

“Far, far away in a distant land, very long ago, there lived a handsome prince.”

“But not as handsome as the other prince!” Chiho interjects, eyes bright.

“Now, now,” Viktor chides, smiling to himself over the pure excitement she gets from her father, “you have to listen or else the story won’t come true.”

Chiho claps her hand exaggeratedly over her mouth. She quiets.

Viktor continues. “The prince was exceptionally talented at making beautiful things. He could make castles and mountains grow with barely a thought when it would take other men months and years to decide how to arrange them together. He was very famous for his skill. He won many awards! But there was something wrong, you see: there was a little piece of his heart missing.”

Chiho gasps from behind her fingers. Viktor leans over to kiss the top of her head.

“Now you probably don’t know it because Papa and I make sure you have all of your heart with you every day, but it’s a terrible thing to have a piece of your heart missing. Food isn’t as delicious – even the katsudon your grandmother makes wouldn’t be half as tasty as it’s supposed to be! Colors are dull, and music sounds like it’s being played somewhere very far away. But the prince had been living with a piece of his heart missing for so long he couldn’t tell that anything was wrong. He thought only that this must be what it feels like to be a prince.

“He thought maybe that he didn’t want to be a prince anymore, but a prince was the only thing he knew how to be.

“One day the king and the prince took a journey to a faraway place full of strangers who didn’t speak the prince’s language or eat his food. He liked it there, though, because the people were very kind to him.”

Chiho starts to wiggle underneath Viktor’s arm because she knows her favorite part is about to come next. Her tiger rolls off her squirming lap and into a pile of other soft toys that takes up roughly a quarter of the space on her bed. Perhaps Yuuri has a point, Viktor thinks. Perhaps Viktor does not need to bring home quite so many presents for their daughter. But he feels guilty if he misses a story and doesn’t have anything else to make it up to her with.

As though the thought of him is all that’s needed to summon him, Viktor looks up and sure enough Yuuri’s standing at the doorway, the baby on his shoulder. He’s swaying lightly back and forth in that absent way of his.

“On the very last day of the prince’s stay in the faraway place the king commanded him to go to a very grand ball in a tall tower in the middle of a city by the sea,” he says to Chiho, but with his eyes on Yuuri. A flush begins to rise on Yuuri’s cheeks; he knows where this is going too.

“The ball! The ball!” Chiho says in a child’s almost whisper. Viktor does not reach up to rub his ringing ears, but only because he’s had so much practice. “And the mostest pretty prince was there!”

“He was,” Viktor solemnly agrees. Yuuri retreats into the darkness of the hallway, ears burning even after so many years and having been through the origin of the story personally. Viktor feels a wide smile stretch across his face from somewhere inside. He tickles Chiho lightly, because he can, because he loves to make her laugh. “The most handsome prince in the entire world was at the ball as well, and he swept the prince directly off his feet.”

“They danced,” Chiho breathes, grabbing onto Viktor’s shirt to make sure the story hasn’t changed since the last time she heard it.

“They danced,” Viktor says, although they hadn’t exactly. He would tell it correctly, but Yuuri has something against him explaining to a five year old how it works to have one person dancing and the other person sitting. (In Viktor’s opinion Chiho wouldn’t think anything of it and Yuuri is a pervert, but.) “And with every step the prince felt like he could fly if only the most handsome prince in the entire world would ask him to. He felt like he had come home for the very first time in his life.”

“Even though he was really really really really really far away from home and he didn’t even have a Makkachin with him?”

“Even then,” Viktor says. “He’d left the best dog in the entire world at home in the distant land, but in that moment he didn’t even miss him. _That_ was how far in love he had fallen.”

Chiho giggles because she thinks love is the silly faces her Papas make in the morning while they cook her breakfast. It’s the silly way they start dancing in the living room when she’s trying to watch cartoons in the evening after she gets home from a very important day of coloring and getting her stuffed bear to behave himself. It’s the silly way they kiss like gross adults who don’t even care about boy germs when everybody but the baby is supposed to be helping fold the laundry. It’s all very silly, and silly things are happy things. Chiho giggles.

Viktor continues. “It was near the very end of the night when the grand ball was practically over when the most handsome prince in the entire world drew the prince aside and placed a hand on his chest. ‘Prince,’ he said very regally, ‘I believe I have something of yours, and you have something of mine.’

“Just then the prince looked at the most handsome prince in the entire world’s own chest and noticed something glowing and blue hanging around his neck. It did not suit him,” Viktor hears a pointed snort from the next room. Oh good, Yuuri was done putting the baby down for the night, “but that was not the point. The point was that the glowing blue something suited _Viktor_ , because…”

He barely had to wait. “‘Cause it was his heart! His heart!”

“Exactly, Chiho, because the most handsome prince in the entire world was wearing the missing piece of the prince’s heart around his neck the entire time. And when the prince looked down, he realized he had a glowing blue something around his own neck. It was-”

“The heart!”

“Yes, yes, it was a piece of the most handsome prince in the entire world’s heart. You see, he had been missing a piece of his heart too, and because they had been separated by so many days of land and sea neither of them had known how to find it. Or even that it was something they needed to find in the first place! They couldn’t see the chains around their necks because their hearts did not have the strength to glow until they were close enough to each other to dance.”

Chiho flings herself back onto her mountain of pillows and sighs, eyes heavy and dreamy, content. “An’ then they changed heart necklaces an’ got married an’ had a princess and she was me,” she says all in one breath that turns on its tail into a yawn.

“They did, my princess,” Viktor says, “they did.”

He pulls her soft orange comforter over her arms and makes sure she has space to breathe among all her stuffed animals - …Yuuri really does have a point – before giving her nose one last kiss goodnight. She shushes him and pats the side of his face. He turns off her bedside lamp and closes her bedroom door behind him. The stars on her ceiling glow yellow and blue and green in a celestial whirl Yuuri helped her shape like so many galaxies.

This is something Viktor does every night, almost, but it overcomes him every time. He pads back to his bedroom quietly, careful not to wake the baby, and finds Yuuri in bed, hunched over his phone. His glasses have slipped down to rest on the edge of his nose. He’s got a bit of spittle in his hair. (Viktor will tell him about that part later.)

He’s still the most handsome prince in the entire world.

“I appreciate how you gloss over the part where I dry humped you in front of two hundred people and then stumbled away wearing your tie with my shirt unbuttoned,” Yuuri says, wry, eyes still on his screen.

Viktor pulls his shirt up and over his head. He leaves it on the ground next to his slippers for later in the night, when he will be tired and cold and need something to absorb mess from the baby. “I thought I’d save that detail for when she has a boy she wants to impress,” he says. “Or a girl. I’ll tell her about the dance you and Christophe gave Mickey if she has a boy and girl she wants to impress at the same time.”

The most handsome prince in the entire world blushes, but he sets his phone down and rolls over to pull Viktor into his arms when Viktor settles in under the down duvet.

Makkachin settles down at the edge of the bed comfortably.

In the blessed, temporary stillness, Viktor closes his eyes and allows his dreams to whisk him away to faraway lands, safe in the knowledge his full heart will be there with icicle feet and warm hands when the sun pulls him back to the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> This interlude brought to you by MY RAGE and MYSTERY REFRESHES and FSJDLKFLKJDS. Which is to say, it was originally supposed to be [a quick tumblrfic](https://kixboxer.tumblr.com/post/160631515462/cubicle-gods-au-in-the-future-when-they-have) last night. My browser and/or tumblr decided **no**. No, instead we are going to eat this fic and you will have to rewrite it from your leaky sieve memory. It’s not quite in the order it’s supposed to be, but I think I got all the key pieces back in there with a couple new embellishments.
> 
> Also: Chiho is named the way she is for entirely the reason you’re thinking. Yuuri named her because he is beautifully petty. Viktor spends the rest of his life very lightly torn, because he has latent Chihoko resentment until his dying day, BUT CHIHO IS HIS PRINCESS.
> 
> Double: There will be a third proper cubefic! It is just coming along painfully slowly.


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